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Monday, November 25, 2013

Today's recipe is from my drafts. These cute hand pies i made during navrathri, when there was loads of apples around, i made them after making Apple chocolate smoothie. The recipe is inspired from The Blonde Buckeye. I first saw them in Foodgawker's gallery and totally loved the shape of it. I have just replaced the sour cream in the recipe with hung curd and used 50-50 Whole wheat flour and All purpose flour.

I found these hand pies easy to serve than the regular pies. I actually prepared the entire dough into pies and baked 4 at a time, freezing the rest. They come in quite handy when you have a guest or when you crave for something sweet. These are good to be packed for lunchboxes too, as they are small and handy to pick and eat.

Ingredients (makes a dozen)

For Crust

2 tbsp hung curd

2 tbsp Lemon Juice

4 tbsp Ice Water

1.5 cups Wheat Flour

1 Cup All Purpose Flour

2 tsp Granulated Sugar

2 tsp Cinnamon

1 tsp Salt

1 cup very cold Unsalted Butter, cut in ½” cubes2 tbsp of milk for brushing the top

For Filling

4 tsp Lemon Juice, divided

2 cups Granny Smith Apples

¼ cup Granulated Sugar

1 teaspoon Cinnamon

Method

For Filling

Add 2 teaspoons lemon juice into a large mixing bowl. Peel, core & chop apples into ½” cubes. Toss the chopped apples into the bowl with the lemon juice to keep from browning as you cut them.

Add sugar, 2 more teaspoons lemon juice and cinnamon to the apples, mix well. Let the fruit mixture sit in the fridge, until use.

For Crust

To prepare hung curd, take about 1/4cup of yogurt and put in a sieve. i used my tea-strainer. Keep it on top of glass/tumbler, so it can drain the whey out. I kept in the fridge for an hour for it to drain.

Whisk together hung curd, lemon juice and ice water in a bowl. In another large bowl, whisk together the flours, sugar, cinnamon and salt. Add in cold butter cubes & work them into the flour using a pastry cutter, i didn't have one, so i used my hands to incorporate it.

When the flour resemble bread crumbs. Add in sour cream mixture and start to mix it in. Once it starts to clump together, form a solid ball out of the pieces.

Divide the dough in 2 disks and wrap each one separately in plastic wrap. Don't work the dough too much to avoid the butter getting warm. Refrigerate the dough packs for 1-2 hours.

To make the pies:

Preheat oven to 180C. Line a baking pan with parchment paper. Once the dough has been chilled, using one pack at a time (leaving the rest in the refrigerator) roll the dough out onto a clean, generously floured work surface. Roll the dough out until about ⅛” thick.

Using a large cookie cutter, cut shapes from the dough & place them on the baking tray. Once a batch of 4 or 5 is done, store it in the refrigerator until you’re done with the remainder of the dough.

Once all the shapes are cut, place a large spoonful of apple filling onto half of the shapes (leave about a ½” border without filling). Brush the edges with little milk and place another dough shape on top of the filling, stretching the edges to meet one another. Crimp the edges with a fork until sealed. Brush the tops with more milk & cut tiny slits in the tops to vent. Top each pie with a little sprinkle castor sugar.

Bake pies for about 20-25 minutes (or until the filling is bubbly and the crust starts to turn golden). Allow to cool on a wire rack for at least 10-20 minutes before handling. Serve warm or at room temperature.

I made about a dozen pies from the above mentioned measurements. I made these hand pies for a week. Made the filling one day, the dough the next day. Dough and the filling was in the fridge for about 2 days. Cut out the pies and shaped them and baked about 4 pies a day for the next 3 days.